The Red Spectacles — movienight

lateen watched this on 2026-01-30

UNITARY

To be honest, I feel like this was a movie made for me. It goes from a serious drama to silly comedy in the most campy, but genuine way. This movie also contributes to a trend I see in a lot of East Asian stuff where you see characters change drastically after skipping ahead in time. The subtitles can sometimes be nonsensical, but I feel like that’s more to do with it being too culturally specific and thus basically impossible to translate. They used the orchestra hit in a song which was cool to notice :) rot13 encoded spoilers: gur glcr bs fuvg v guvax bs jura v gnxr gbb ybat bs n fubjre

THE ANGEL’S SPECTACLES: LATEEN’S FIRST DOUBLE FEATURE

When deciding on what movie to watch this Friday, I narrowed down my picks to 1 option, The Red Spectacles. However, when I watch anything from a particular director I prefer to do it in release order, and Angel’s Egg happened to come before it. I didn’t feel like watching an animated movie, so I ended up in mental angui-hey wait a minute, Angel’s Egg is only 70 mins long! I could watch BOTH movies back to back. Besides, I feel like watching an animated movie now anyway. I could even write reviews for movienight with a thing comparing the 2 films and put it in BOTH reviews! Anyway, enough talking to myself.

To put it simply, Angel’s Egg is a serious mom-youre-too-loud-talking-to-your-new-boyfriend anime, while The Red Spectacles is more of a weird having-an-awkward-intervention-with-your-moms-new-boyfriend-about-that-strange-movie-youre-watching kind of movie.

Visually the films have a lot of similarities. They’re both high contrast and use color sparingly, although the way they use color is different. AE has color all the time using bright tones for emphasis, while TRS opts to be shot in black & white and switches to color film when needed. They’re both slow but AE is quiet about its presentation. TRS is loud and doesn’t hold back about its style. You WILL see a dozen shots of a guy looking forward in sunglasses and you WILL enjoy it.

Trust is something that filmmakers have to establish, otherwise the audience will disregard what the filmmakers are trying to say. When I was watching AE there was one shot in particular that I thought was going on for too long, I wasn’t trusting the filmmaker. After waiting for it to pay off though, I realized that choice made sense in the context of the scene. After that realization I trusted the filmmaker fully. AE is entirely sincere when its trying to get you to trust it. TRS, however, completely breaks the audiences trust as much as possible. This makes sense as TRS IS a goofy comedy, but it actually ends up serving the story its trying to tell. TRS transcending trust in this way somehow makes it genuine to me.

Something interesting is that I feel both these films may have inspired MADGOD. Combine the premise of AE, a person carrying something into an unfolding world, with the sick-ass armor + suitcase of TRS, and you basically have MADGOD. Obviously I have no proof of this other than those vague similarities, but Phil Tippett is an animator so I think its plausible.

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